c0astlin3s-blog

[c0astlin3s-blog]

#2 Penance - Serpentwithfeet by Me, someone who needs to get stuff off his frankly, disappointingly, not that hairy chest. Judgment has run from my door, Swarms of flies have brought honey and much much more for me to be ashamed of, My evil has not been appraised. 1:

You’re a first-year (bloody) student. Raised in working-class Lancashire, moved away from Scotland as a nipper, made it through the horrors of a) being Scottish in an English high school and b) not being a hardcase nobhead, got your head down in college and made it onto a Uni course. You’re loving the freedom, the whole experience of it. Even after three weeks it feels totally fresh and invigorating. You’re not vain, but you've noticed that people seem to find you funny and charming and it feels good. Already met some solid people, you’ve had some nights of absolute bliss. Now, at this moment, you’re standing in a sickly-lit, musty Halls corridor, one hand over your eye and holy shit does it hurt.

About 15ft away from you stands a man in equally as much shock but nowhere near as much pain. In between you, but closer to you, lies the broom from the cleaning cupboard. One of the girls you’re kind of hot for stands behind you, a side character in the act but keeping well out of shot.

“Joe!” you shout to the frozen figure in front of you, “JOE! Is it bad, man? Hurts like fuck man.”

“Er- I-er, let’s have a look man,” he replies, not moving forward but gesturing for you to move your hand away. You can feel the blood has trickled from the socket down to your chin and the pain seems to be snowballing. Your shaking hand drops to your chest level and his reaction is as unnerving as it is reflex.

“Oh fuck. Fuck, mate, fucking hell, oh mate, I’m so sorry - I”

“Joe, is it bad, man? I can’t see anything out of it man, is it bad? Joe?”

Just when you need him to hold it together and start filling back in the sudden rift in your chest that’s 10 miles deep and falling fast, he visibly crumples. Someone’s running up the corridor shouting - the Halls Security, your friends and Joe’s friends, you’re being led up the corridor and down to reception where the ambulance will arrive soon. One of them goes to pick him out of his daze and he’s pulling at his hair, cycling through the motions of bumbling, shouting, weeping, moaning, defying. They separate you, which is for the best, he’s making this 100x worse. You hear him talking to the Security officer you both only know as "Eyebrows" (they were spectacular though, eh?). Some words momentarily cut their way through the pain, the hubbub, the approaching siren and the 2 inches of fire door between you in the Halls Security office and the reception area:

“It’s gone man, he’s never gonna see out of it again. I’ve lived with doctors and stuff, I’ve seen stuff.”

“You’re talking pish, you’ve no clue if he will or not, you’re no helping him saying aw that, are ye? You sure it’s a good idea for you tae go wae him? You’re both fucking pished.”

It’s been three solid, stupid, amazing days of drinking whisky from dusk til dawn, but there’s nothing that sobers you up like trauma. Three hours later, you’ll be sitting together when the doctor confirms the worst. You’ll never see out of the eye again, it’s been sewn back together but it may need removing and replacing. And sitting next to you is not your Mum, Dad, best mate, big sis, little bro. It’s the person that threw the broom that landed in your eye socket and you’ve known each other for three weeks.

2:

“Guilt” has its roots in the Old English word gelt - “money.” It stems from a crime or offense that requires some sort of payment in atonement. Guilt is not shame, a word which is tentatively linked by folks in the know to another old English word hama - literally “covering”. It nods to a garment/veil which was worn by someone who wished to publicly display their inner penitence, that they were recognising something in themselves that was undesirable, a self-damnation of sorts.

This little end of the blog (I’m trying not to go too TL;DR with this) is me trying to process the former. I need to preface this in no uncertain terms: my friend is the one with the lifelong trauma, my friend is the one who had something taken away by me, my friend is the one who has suffered infinitely more than I, the frozen figure in the corridor, ever have or will.

The event above has, however, shaped both our lives in the aftermath. Because of my friend’s incredible character, he decided not to wallow but to kick on. He’s now happily married with two little sons, working a job which allows him to use his insane gift for languages (fluent in four as far as I know). 

But there I go, and there it goes - trying to lighten the guilt - the payment that I know is due. It’s a feeling for me that has never and likely will never go away, the feeling that I owe something, that I have an overdue and undecided payment. I have been waiting ten years for the collector and he/she still has not arrived. My friend and his wonderful family have never, ever made me feel like I owe anything. His mother literally rang me later that week and asked how I was, to let me know that I didn’t owe a gilt. So who is it that’s going to decide on my payment - how on earth do you begin work out the format of repayment? I know that it’s not for me to decide, he and his wouldn’t even consider asking, there is no God above to offer realignment (as handy as that would be). So I’m in a sort of Kafka-esque limbo, waiting on an undefined agency to reach my case file and process their demands.

I think that’s why this lyric stuck with me on impact, and probably will resonate with a lot of people. I’m off to read up on guilt and try to make sense of it all. I do think it’s probably time to have a go at doing this constructively. The public veil, the hama, the shame - it’s just as pointless and laughable as some doylem 400 years ago cutting aboot in a black cloak to show everyone how very sorry they were for something. Self-sabotaging, self-loathing, wallowing, self-denying - I’ve been stuck on that loop for 10 years, that pissed-up cyclone of emotions sitting in the musty Hall reception (again - I need to reiterate -  I am by far the less affected party). And I should probably pick up the phone and see how the old bugger’s getting on, it’s been a while.

[c0astlin3s-blog]

#1: Mykonos - Fleet Foxes by Me, someone who usually barfs at nu-folk.  “And you will go to Mykonos With a vision of a gentle coast And a sun to maybe dissipate Shadows of the mess you made”

Two years ago, I lived three doors down from a huge prison building, in a nice little house where I once found a dead kitten in the ginnel between ours and next door. Two months ago, we were renting a small two up-two down house, squashed into a gravelly cul-de-sac, paying yer racist da half of my wage for the pleasure of being five minutes walk from a workplace that sapped the life out of me. Now, I live overlooking the bay pictured above.  So the lyric shouldn’t take too much working out in terms of its significance in terms of escaping to a paradise in search of the sun and some sort of slate-wiping (not literal ones - there are a lot of roofing jobs out here though, FWIW). “But, Joe!” I hear you cry, “Those shadows - the kitten, the job - they weren’t of messes that YOU had made.Your lyric doesn’t fit! Phoney! Fraud!” Well, maybe those particular ones weren’t my messes per se, but every human life has a lot of mess. My life so far has provided me not so much a closet as a walk-in-wardrobe of skeletons and a graveyard of spectres - some of which I would one day like to be brave enough to exorcise on here. Even the workplace thing: The job was one I took on in the knowledge that the school was in the worst-performing quartile for every subject. But I would walk right in and save the day, right? Google “naive egomaniac” and you will see me. They didn’t even get my good side.  Fast-forward a year after taking on my one-doyle-mission, I had what I can now openly call some kind of breakdown. I think that’s where I’m getting at with this. I learned self-care in that period. Some people learn these basic maintenance habits consciously, or subconsciously, in early childhood. I guess I didn’t, for whatever reason. In the middle of the school day, I had what I now recognise as a panic attack, walked out of school and through the streets hyperventilating and blubbing down the phone to my Mam. I doubled my existing dose of happy-pill (strictly prescription, kids), took a month off “on the sick” and mostly spent the time under one particular tree. For a while, the walk to and time spent under the tree, I guess was a “Mykonos”, where I went to dissipate the shadows. 

Please, credit me to the extent that I know people have many, many problems that simple self-care won’t fix. I am never, ever going to say that self-care will work to solve all your problems. My biggest “Mykonos” is still the little white Citalo-pill I pop every morning to balance my head-chems. But the discovery of self-care is something that evaded me til I was 29, almost to the cost of my life, and this lyric explains the concept perfectly. 

I am obscenely privileged that my current situation is pretty much the same craic as the actual Greek island in the song. It is through the hard work of others that I am able to live here for a while. Maybe your Mykonos is your bedroom, your living room, your table where you draw/write. Maybe it’s your parents’ house, your grandparents’ house. Maybe it’s a tree up a hill. It took me two years of absolute grinding internal misery and self-loathing to allow myself the thought, “I am going to put myself first on this occasion and go to my Mykonos”, and not feel like I had failed or was failing myself or others. 

I know nobody’s asking for my advice but I have some, for what it’s worth:  take some time to find your Mykonoses (Mykonosii? Mykonese?). Don’t let others tell you what/where they are. Even in this paradise, I have had a panic attack and shed many tears. You don’t get the worm out of the apple by putting it in a shinier bowl. Your Mykonos could be an activity rather than a place, you’d be surprised at how well that annoying received wisdom about banishing the demons works, in my experience (alongside doctor’s orders, of course). Regular exercise, keeping your house/room/flat in order, trips to the countryside, contact with cute animals, having blankets and treats on a sofa in front of a film you already know you love. I know how inertia hits and you don’t feel like any of those things are do-able, but I promise you that they are. This HuffPost article has some really practical tips that will 100% do you good when you are ready to give even one of them a bash: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-pike/4-self-care-tips-to-boost-your-well-being_b_8720752.html But please, please, don’t downplay the importance of finding, having and using your self-care habits without feeling shame. They push back the walls of that tunnel vision that closes in. Eventually, something may happen that could blow those walls away, and trust me - you will be so much the readier for it if you have these good habits. It’s the reluctance to habitually care for one’s self that damn near killed me, literally. You will realise that pretty much nobody gives you anything less than respect and encouragement for doing it. And if they do? Then they are either lacking the intelligence to understand, or, sadly, they are bottoming out and seeing you kick on will hurt them (I have been this person).

Still skeptical? Try one or two of these chats on for size: https://www.ted.com/playlists/299/the_importance_of_self_care 

Cheers, look after yourselves, Joe ------------------------------------ There you go: my maiden voyage into this blog. Felt a little too long but unsure of what form I want it to take right now. I’ll hopefully have a few different voices to mix things up here, but this blog in itself is a Mykonos for me, so I will be writing regularly too. Cheers if you got this far,  Joe.